Who’s Got The Best 3G Coverage

3G coverage is the spine of mobile broadband. Without it, 3G speeds drop to a lethargic dialup level service (aka EDGE, GPRS or 1xRTT speeds).

As it stands, you can’t have mobile broadband without it. Naturally, that begets the question:

Who’s got the best 3G coverage?

There are four major 3G players right now who we’ll dance with:

AT&T

Sprint

T-Mobile

Verizon

While Sprint has a partnership with Clear for WiMAX that’s 4G coverage and is covered elsewhere. Also, most prepaid mobile broadband providers (with maybe the exception of Cricket) piggyback by reselling the service of one of these 3G providers.

So, in alphabetical order, let’s do a 3G coverage roundup:

AT&T 3G Coverage

AT&T’s Data Coverage map above can be misleading. On a national level, it lumps 2G speeds and 3G speeds in one big sea of blue. This wouldn’t be a problem if the difference in speeds weren’t like night and day (it’s like dialup vs. DSL). It’s most likely a tactic to counter Verizon’s advertisement attacks on their lacking 3G coverage. To get accurate representation, you’ll need to zoom to a city or street level.

To their credit, they’re testing out 21 Mbps HSPA+ speeds in Philadelphia while working on upgrading their entire network to 7.2 Mbps.

How does 21 Mbps and 7.2 Mbps compare to everyone else?

AT&T currently holds the nation’s fastest 3G network title with an average of 1.4 Mbps (yes, that’s 1.4 and not 14). While AT&T is also working on a 7.2 Mbps upgrade, T-Mobile’s ahead of the game thanks to a smaller 3G network.

Wait, what’s that?

Yes. A smaller 3G network. All that glitters is not gold.

While AT&T doesn’t have great 3G coverage, T-Mobile’s is definitely worse. Thankfully, they may not suffer from the same reliability issues (studies have yet to confirm). It’s highly recommended to ‘vet’ their coverage before getting mobile broadband.

Sprint 3G Coverage

"Sprint has 3G speeds on most interstates and just about everywhere in any major city. Despite their horrible churn (customer retention rate), Sprint has a pretty robust 3G network following the acquisition of Nextel some years back.

I’ve personally tested it over 1001 miles of highway at 70 miles per hour (New Orleans to Jacksonville and Tampa to Atlanta) and I had my connection get dropped once…for 15 minutes total. That’s solid. It’s even helped me out when I blew a tire at 80 miles/hr".

With expected sales of $1 billion dollars in 2010, the Amazon Kindle is entirely dependent on Sprint’s mobile broadband network to make their digital book sales.

That speaks a large volume about their faith in the network’s 3G coverage, reliability and speed.

Does that mean Sprint’s 3G network is without fault?

Hardly.

But as mentioned before, they ranked as the most reliable mobile broadband network (even beating Verizon the ‘nation’s most reliable network’).

PCWorld’s 13-city 3G speed tests showed them to have a 90.5% reliability in establishing and maintaining connections (AT&T had 68% reliability rating).

If coverage and reliability are important to you, Sprint mobile broadband is a solid choice.

As always, confirm mobile broadband coverage in your area before taking the plunge. Be sure to click on ‘Data, Email and Multimedia’ before plugging in your street address for Sprint.

Verizon 3G Coverage

Verizon 3G Coverage makes AT&T look like a joke. While there’s a lot of press covering this, no one ever pits Verizon against Sprint, their real mobile broadband coverage competition.

"At one point, Verizon Wireless Coverage was being advertised as ‘the largest mobile broadband network’ based on how many millions of people it reached.

It was pretty obvious they were going after the claim that Sprint had made for quite some time.

To further push home that point, they even launched the only 3G coverage map by a carrier that compared their coverage to others (AT&T and Sprint). Since then, not only have those ‘largest network’ ads disappeared, but the comparative coverage of Sprint has been completely removed".

It wasn’t a battle they could win (against Sprint at least). With both companies reaching over 250 million people in the United States, it’s a pretty close call.

Nevertheless, both companies have robust networks.

While Sprint got a reliability rating of 90.5%, Verizon followed closely behind with 89.8% in PCWorld’s 3G tests in 2009. That’s less than a percent of a difference. If given scientific confidence intervals and the like, they may very well be the same.

So what does this mean for you?

Verizon, like Sprint, is a solid reliable bet for 3G mobile broadband coverage.

Of course, this is looking at the overall picture. There’s the small chance you fall in the 10% unreliable range. Like everything in life, nothing is a sure bet. To help protect against those times though, here’s Verizon’s 3G coverage map to help you check what things look like on the street level.

So Who’s Got The Best Mobile Coverage?

It’s a tie.

*1.

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2.

3.

When looking at the nationwide level, it’s simply too close to call when it comes to Verizon and Sprint.

While the companies battled for the title a couple years ago, they’ve long since stopped trying. Instead, they’ve both turned focus to the next battle (i.e. WiMAX vs. LTE). 4G coverage will be the next battle.

With both sides gathering arms (Sprint’s already launched several WiMAX markets alongside their partner Clear while Verizon gears up for a late 2010 launch of LTE). Expect this to really pick up swing in 2011.

For now, your best bet will be either Sprint or Verizon.

While AT&T isn’t abysmal, they leave a lot to be desired. T-Mobile, unfortunately, is still playing catch-up. Don’t take your eye off of ’em. Like a game of ‘Red Light, Green Light’, they just might sneak up and cross the finish line while everyone looking elsewhere.

If you decide to get mobile broadband through one of the links below, I do make some money. Just some full disclosure. Besides, every broadband card is free or puts money in your pocket. Talk about win-win.

Mohammad Alshahri says:

Ron says:

Interesting, article, but that was 2010. Now we see in 2011, sprint has dropped out of the race and become just another at&T in coverage. having just gotten a new mifi setup with sprint and not liking the coverage i got, i had to start researching this out, only to find that not only is verizon’s 4g vastly superior to sprint’s, but as sprint has apparently dropped out of a lot of their 3g contracts, they are now a very distant 2nd to verizon. fortunately i discovered this before the 30 day plan, so can return this item and can the plan, but before i do will get a verizon unit to do various side by side tests with, even though at this point will only be to confirm what has become rather clear.

got the mifi 2200 from virgin mobile got online fine and did what was exspected and tried the other unit also works best outside i must thank you for the hard work you do so far with what i have gotten out of the reveiws has been very helpful to me thanks marc

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In short, I'll try help you do your due diligence so let's be cool. Please don't sue me.